The constitution of the CES Social Movements Research Network has been ratified via an online vote in June 2015. All members of the Research Network were encouraged to review this document and submit their vote. The e-balloting period will begin on June 22 and end on July 1, 2015. If you are a member of the Network, but you did not receive an e-ballot on June 22, please get in touch with CES at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Network Description

This international multidisciplinary research network, established in May 2011, now comprises over 200 scholars in over 25 countries and 20 disciplines. With a directory of researchers studying social movements in Europe, circulation of announcements related to the field and a series of research initiatives, the network is a lively online presence, free to everyone working in the area.

While active citizenship and popular protest have been a perennial theme of European societies, European civil society has come in recent decades to have an increasingly transnational character, accelerating with the development of new social movements such as environmentalism and second-wave feminism, the fall of the Berlin wall, the rise of new right-wing movements and current unrest over economic crises from Iceland to Spain to Bulgaria.

The CES Social Movements Research Network brings together scholars and graduate students located around the world and working within a multiplicity of disciplines to study the themes of social movements, popular protest and contentious politics in Europe, as well as the ways in which social movements interact with spheres such as the media, culture and memory, democratic institutions, policing, etc. and the longer-term outcomes of social movements both positive and negative.

While it welcomes scholars whose primary focus is national, regional or local, it also supports and encourages comparative and cross-national work, studies of transnational movements and those engaging with European institutions, as well as historical work on earlier generations of European social movements. The network is open to researchers from anywhere in the world who study social movements in Europe, from a range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. It is multilingual as far as scholarly work goes although we expect that administrative / coordinating discussions will be through English.

Its main goals are to build a network of scholars from a range of disciplines and career stages in order to foster collaborative and comparative work; to organize themed workshops and panels at conferences on areas of common interest; to develop work for joint publishing projects; to create webspace for working papers and dissemination initiatives; to provide an arena for the fruitful collaboration between scholars from different institutions and at different career stages; and to support the contribution of scholarship to processes of active citizenship at all levels in the democratic process.

So far the network has seen the development of a directory of members' research interests, working languages, and publications; the opening of an online networking space for participants; events at the annual CES conference of Europeanists (Barcelona 2011, Boston 2012, Amsterdam 2013, Washington 2014) including roundtables and symposia, workshops for junior researchers, panels and network luncheons; the Routledge book Understanding European movements: new social movements, global justice struggles, anti-austerity protest; and fruitful collaborations with the ECPR and ESA social movements networks, co-organised with Harvard's Berkman Center on Internet and Society and with the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam.

Co-chairs: Lucy Finchett-Maddock, University of Sussex Christian Fröhlich, National Research University Higher School of Economics Moscow